GEOMETRIC HEART TOP
COMBINE HAND AND MACHINE STITCHING TO DECORATE A PLAIN TEE WITH A FUN GEOMETRIC HEART USING COOL AQUA TONES
Give a plain tee that added wow factor using hand and machine embroidery
GETTIING STTAARRTTEEDD
Prepare your sewing machine by dropping the feed dogs – the mechanism that grips and pulls fabric through your sewing machine. This will allow you to freely move your fabric. Your sewing machine manual
should tell you how to do this. Next, stretch
your fabric into a hoop. Do this in reverse to the normal way, with the inner hoop uppermost. Make sure the fabric is really tight in the hoop, this stops the threads from warping and makes the whole process easier. Start with test fabric to make sure the tension is correct and the bottom thread doesn’t show though. Remember the stitch length is determined by the speed at which you stitch
– the faster you go, the shorter your stitches
will be. When machine embroidering, try to work in one continuous line. If you do need to stop, make sure you lower the foot so you don’t have jumps in your stitching.
MATERIALS
Cropped t-shirt: white Stranded cotton: 1 skein each of duck egg, mint green, sea foam and turquoise Machine thread: Aurifil 40 weight cotton thread in shade 4662 (crème de menthe) Sewing machine with standard foot
Medium-weight tear-away stabiliser Medium-weight fusible interfacing Temporary fabric spray adhesive Embroidery hoop: 13cm diameter
Basic embroidery kit
STITCHES USED
Backstitch, Machine Straight Stitch
NOTES
Find the template on p77.
01 Transfer the heart design from the template onto the front of your t-shirt using your preferred method – you may want to resize it slightly to suit the style or fit of your chosen shirt.
02 Cut out a square of medium-weight tear-away stabiliser and use temporary fabric spray adhesive to fix it to the reverse of your design, inside the t-shirt. Once in place, mount the design centrally in your hoop, ensuring the t-shirt fabric is taut but not stretched or distorted – to avoid puckering the fabric while stitching.
03 Before you start stitching, it is important to check that your threads are colourfast because you don’t want the colours to run in the wash. Branded cottons such as DMC and Anchor should be colourfast, but if you are unsure then you can test your threads by soaking a short length in warm water and leaving it to dry on some white fabric – if the fabric stays white after the thread is dry then you are good to go. Use two strands of your stranded cotton to start filling a random triangle of the heart, working a series of Backstitch lines that radiate out from one corner of the triangle. Continue to fill the triangles randomly in this way, switching between mint green, duck egg and sea foam, until around half of the heart is filled with colour. Refer to the step image for colour placement if preferred.
04 Remove your work from the hoop. Use a Machine Straight Stitch and Aurifil’s variegated cotton thread in shade 4662 to fill the remaining triangles of the heart. Work back and forth across each section, moving the needle across slightly at the wider edge of the shape but always coming back to the same point on the opposite side, to create a similar radiating effect as the one you created before. Mount your work back into the hoop.
05 Use two strands of bright turquoise stranded cotton to work over the outlines of the heart in Backstitch, making sure to stitch around each individual triangle in the heart.
06 Remove your design from the hoop and turn the t-shirt inside out. Gently snip or tear away the excess stabiliser from around the stitched design and discard it. Finally, cut a piece of fusible interfacing that is slightly larger than the heart design and gently fuse it over the back of the work, following the manufacturer’s instructions. This will not only neaten the inside of the t-shirt but will protect the back of the stitches, too.